Lawford Kidd's Blog

A recent campaign by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) to raise awareness of occupational cancers is continuing to grow and has become the most successful campaign the charity has developed, IOSH has reported.

No Time to Lose is highlighting five of the common risk factors for occupational cancer registrations and deaths - diesel engine exhaust emissions, solar radiation, asbestos, silica dust and shift work.

“It’s not necessarily the people who are operating plant machinery that are going to die,” explained IOSH President Ian Harper. “The person who is dying is the one who is cutting a piece of concrete with a disc cutter and making a big cloud of dust, but they are suffering a lot slower.”

An industry-wide campaign to cut the number of deaths from occupational cancer has been launched by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH).  

IOSH highlights that even by conservative estimates, some 8,000 people die from cancer and around 14,000 contract the disease each year in the UK because of exposure to a work-related carcinogen, such as diesel exhaust fumes, silica dust or asbestos fibres. Worldwide, occupational cancer claims the lives of more than 666,000 a year – one death every 47 seconds.

The figures far outstrip those for fatal incidents in the workplace, but the invisibility of carcinogens, the long latency of their effects and a lack of knowledge continue to produce this staggeringly high number of preventable deaths and cancer registrations.